Most people, and I am not kidding, tell me I look like Richard Dreyfus, and a few say George Carlin--such a universal face have I, but Bucko: wait till you see my LEGS!

1962, I hadn't graduated high school yet, but was damned close to the event. Hint: I graduated the year before the Beatles hit the American scene, and four years before John Coltrane died; the latter event certainly made more of an impact on me than did the former.

As for wine, back then you could buy it at eighteen, and I did as soon as I could. While my contemporaries guzzled T'bird, I was into St. Emilion, not that I did not partake of the bird, just that it taught me what I did not like.

I am laughing and chuckling and laughing a bit more.......... Just who does have the best legs? Would it be one of the four at the table or maybe, just maybe, would the best legs belong to one of the wines sampled that evening? Or perhaps, maybe to one of the wonderful wives who were present but were not pictured?

Will we ever know who had the best legs?

I was not a great fan of Thunderbird. Annie Green Springs was quite the thing around my haunts. That, and a bit of Mogan David 20/20
(oooh yuck I say now) were in style.

However, when my brother and I broke into our parents liquor cabinet and discoverd a bottle of Chambertin......... boy did we have fun. Oh BOY, were they ever upset!!! But my taste in wine changed from that night onward.

And John Coltrane's death was a very serious matter, about that there is no doubt. Just as was the loss of JFK, but of course for different reasons. What really saddens me a bit is the amount of time it took me to realize just how great Coltrane was......... because when he died I'd not yet heard of him.

While we're traveling down memory lane, one of my first memmoriable "wine experience" was a 1975 Margaux from my father's collection, which I shared with a special lady. I still can't figure out why I drank beer for so long after that.

Hey Dutton, one of the benefits of having grown up in NY City was access to the greats in jazz. I used to hang out at the Village Vanguard where I saw Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Earl Hines, Mose Allison, Herbie Mann, Herbie Hancock, Red Garland, Mingus and on and on... .

The only problem at the Vanguard was the drinks. Had to buy two minimum for each set, and they offered no good wine--then, it was Scotch on the rocks, and of course, only one set a week; I was still under twenty and quite underfinanced.

Ah, remember the Vangard from even earlier days. But, the name Charlie Mingus brings back an even better memory. In the summer of 1960 attended the College International de Cannes. Three hours of school in the morning, followed by an afternoon on the beach surrounded by bikini clad lovelies from all over Europe. On the way to the beach on our Solex' we would stop by the store to pick up a $.15 Rouge de Provence, along with a hunk of cheese and a baguette that brought the tab up to $.50 or 2.5 NF. That always guaranteed company on one's blanket.

One night a group of us Solexed over to Nice for a jazz concert featuring Charlie. The French warm up combo was pretty good. Then Charlie came on and took a half hour to get his bass out of it's case. At the fifteen minute point, the audiance started whistling, and didn't stop until fifteen minutes after the concert ended. One of those nights it was not too proud to be an American. The wine was good though.